Economist Oleksiy Kushch analyzes why attempts to fill the budget by raising taxes are a wrong strategy. The main focus should be on shadow schemes, in particular in the field of electronics imports.
How to fill the budget during war?
The wrong path is to raise taxes on labor and entrepreneurship. In general, raising base rates is a mistake (except for operations of high-margin businesses, such as banking).
The right way is to improve tax administration.
This, in particular, in addition to increasing tax revenues to the budget, eliminates competitive asymmetry, when some pay taxes and others do not. For example, in the gray segment of electronics imports, huge reserves for increasing tax revenues are concentrated. And this is where tax asymmetry is formed: the price of the same iPhone is determined by demand, but those sellers who do not pay taxes have more opportunities for price discounts.
Therefore, legal importers, who pay all taxes during the war, lose, and illegal importers, who barely fill the budget, win. The same products of the famous Apple brand are imported to Ukraine from Asian countries under the guise of cheap accessories - cables, covers, etc. Then these goods are sold bypassing any legal structures (not even through individual entrepreneurs) without cash receipts.
Very often the goods are sent by mail. I will not say that in stores and warehouses where there is a product, its proper accounting is not kept. And even the sale through individual entrepreneurs is not carried out properly. Under such conditions, there is no need to talk about paying taxes, and even more so VAT in the proper amount. As a result, up to 70-80% of imported Apple equipment is sold in Ukraine without proper certification and guarantees.
The head of the Verkhovna Rada tax committee, Danylo Getmantsev, even named specific networks in an interview with the Glavkom: “…. If we talk about other industries, we cannot fail to mention the fight against the “shadow” in the electronics market, which we have been interested in for a long time.
In the fall, we had a very interesting meeting of our committee, where a group of electronics sellers – “Yabko” and another seller – were present. They explained to us in a very serious way that they were working “in the shadows” because they needed a “road map” to get out of this “shadow.” Because they can’t do it themselves, and the Tax Code is not enough for them.
It was an epic speech.
They admitted that they work, breaking up into individual entrepreneurs, because "we are not like that - life is like that." And instead of simply coming out of the "shadows", today they have staged a real media battle with those electronics importers who work more or less "in the open", for example, such as Comfy.
But this is banal tax evasion.
Why does a person who earns a minimum wage have to pay an additional 5% military tax, while a large chain can afford to “splitting into individual entrepreneurs” to optimize taxation? As a result of such actions, the state loses up to UAH 10 billion per year from the gray import of Apple products alone.
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